The Democrats’ Great Betrayal

An unprecedented treachery for which the world is paying a dear price.

by David Horowitz

Yesterday Regnery published The Great Betrayal, a book I have written to mark a watershed moment not only in the War on Terror, which is really a war against the Islamic Jihad, but a watershed moment in American history. The events and controversies chronicled in The Great Betrayal describe an unprecedented defection by a major political party from an American war in progress, and a five- year effort by that party to sabotage the war and undermine America’s troops in the field.

The Democrats’ campaign against the war in Iraq was very different from their opposition to the war in Vietnam, which came after American troops had been in the field for more than a decade and both parties had agreed on a withdrawal. In contrast, the watershed moment in Iraq came in June 2003, when the war was little more than three months old and American troops were facing a ferocious resistance from terrorist forces. In that month the Democratic Party ran a national TV ad accusing Bush of lying about Saddam’s determination to build weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons.

The focus of the Democrats’ attack was sixteen words in Bush’s State of the Union Address in which he referred to a British report that Saddam Hussein was attempting to buy yellow cake uranium in Niger. The statement was true, but a massive campaign in the leftwing media along with the Democrats’ imputation that Bush had lied about the rationale for the war began a five-year effort to slander America’s commander-in-chief and condemn the war in Iraq as illegal, immoral and unnecessary. The consequences of these attacks can be seen in the emergence of ISIS in the vacuum created by the Democrat-led withdrawal from the region, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Christians in Iraq, Syria and Libya and the creation of 18 million refugees in six-year tenure of the “anti-war” president, Barack Obama.

Why did the Democrats turn against a war they had authorized and why did they accuse Bush of deceiving the American people (“Bush lied, people died”)? Not because of anything that had taken place on the battlefield in Iraq. The Democrats turned against the war because an anti-war activist named Howard Dean was set to win the Democratic presidential primary – which happened to coincide with the invasion – by a wide margin. It was Dean’s surge in the polls that caused John Kerry and John Edwards who eventually became the Democratic standard bearers to do an about face, repudiate their previous support of the war, and turn on the president as the chief culprit in the conflict rather than the sadistic tyrant Saddam Hussein. The Democrats even lied about the rationale for the war which was not the existence of weapons of mass destruction but Saddam’s violation of the Gulf War truce and 17 UN Resolutions designed to prevent him from building weapons of mass destruction.

Why did the Democrats claim – falsely – that Bush lied about the reasons for the war? Because the Democrats could not admit that they were turning against a war they themselves had authorized for partisan political gain, undoubtedly the most shameful act by a major political party in the nation’s history.

The Democrats went on to conduct a five-year scorched earth campaign against America’s war in Iraq, which was in effect the central front of the war on terror, as the creation of an Islamic terrorist state has since shown. Democrats did not merely oppose the war but slandered the president as a liar and war criminal, defended the leaks of national security programs (which led to their destruction), converted a minor incident in the Abu Ghraib prison into an international scandal which was then used to defame their country and demoralize its troops, and actively sought to defund the war effort in Congress and force an American defeat. They eventually succeeded in this effort by nominating a leftwing anti-war activist who upon reaching the White House proceeded to make America’s defeat in Iraq a fait accompli, thus creating the vacuum that ISIS has filled.

Did Bush lie about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction as the Democrats claimed? The discovery by ISIS of 2200 rockets filled with Sarin that Saddam had buried explodes this myth, which has been wielded for over a decade by America’s enemies and detractors to undermine the war on terror. Could Bush have lied about the intelligence on Iraq? Hardly. Democrats like John Kerry sat on the intelligence committees and had access to every piece of information that Bush did.

It was Kerry and his running mate Edwards who lied, and the entire Democratic Party leadership along with them. And it’s in Syria and the Levant, Afghanistan and Iraq that our country is now paying the price for this treachery and deceit. And soon, if our military leaders have assessed the threat correctly, we will be paying for their treachery here at home.

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The Mind of the Left

Excerpt from The Black Book of the American Left, Volume II, by David Horowitz. At a 2003 Columbia University teach-in against the war in Iraq, Professor Nicholas DeGenova told the protesters: “peace is not patriotic [but] subversive.” This is a good starting point for understanding the warped perspective of anti-war radicals. DeGenova went on to explain: “Peace anticipates a very different world than the one in which we live – a world where the U.S. would have no place.” This arresting formulation goes to the heart of the questions that were previously raised by the anti-war demonstrations that took place within two weeks of the attacks of 9/11 and were directed at preventing an American response. How could so many Americans be inspired so quickly to oppose their own country’s response to an unprovoked attack by an enemy so vicious? How could “progressives” who decried religious fundamentalism, and claimed to support democracy and women’s rights, and oppose “imperialism,” then go out to defend the terrorist, expansionist state of Iraq? How could they oppose a war for Iraqi freedom?

David Horowitz Discusses the Project

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